Nvidia appears to have evened the score with rival ATI when it comes to the speed of its latest graphics processing unit (GPU). But there's a question mark against some of the benchmarks.The next great heavyweight bout is underway for high-performance game enthusiasts--and we don't mean a cool new boxing game. ATI and Nvidia have been waging a fierce battle for the right to say that it--and not the other--has the world's speediest GPU (graphics processing unit), and both have recently landed new punches.
Nvidia's latest contender is the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, the successor to its GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. When the 5800 Ultra finally hit the market, it was months late, contained a very noisy fan, and took up two slots on a system's backplane. And if that wasn't enough, its performance did not live up to expectations. Outcry from the gaming community did not fall on deaf ears, and Nvidia got a successor to the 5800 Ultra out the door as soon as possible. Although it's not as quiet as a church mouse, the 5900 Ultra's fan won't draw comparisons to a vacuum cleaner, either. The 5900 Ultra, however, is just as bulky as the 5800 Ultra, and it still takes up two slots.
With a few architectural changes to the GPU, it is no surprise that the 5900 Ultra is noticeably faster than the 5800 Ultra. The 5900 Ultra doubles the 5800 Ultra's memory interface from 128 bits to 256 bits, and the on-board memory jumps from 128MB to 256MB. The 5900 Ultra also adds a few new texture-compression technologies. And finally, Nvidia has had a few more months of driver development to further optimise the driver--always a big factor when it comes to boosting performance.
Nvidia sent us a reference-design version of the 5900 Ultra and beta drivers, which we pitted against the latest release from ATI, the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Determining which of the two cards is fastest, however, is not as easy as one might think.
In our 3DMark03 tests, the 5900 Ultra ran circles around the 9800 Pro 256MB. During testing, however, it came to light that some possibly unorthodox rendering techniques were being used by the 5900 that might artificially inflate its scores. Speculation as to what was really going on ran the spectrum from a driver bug to outright cheating. We're staying neutral on this, but we strongly suspect that the next driver release from Nvidia will see a noticeable drop in 3DMark03 performance--the exception to the rule that driver optimisations usually improve performance.
The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra beats ATI's 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro under Futuremark's 3DMark03--but there's a question mark over whether its scores have been artificially inflated.
In the Flyby-Antalus portion of our Unreal Tournament 2003 tests, the 5900 Ultra was consistently faster than the 9800 Pro 256MB. However, on the less-GPU-intensive Botmatch-Antalus portion of the test, the results were more mixed, with both cards taking the lead, depending on the individual test.
The GPU-intensive Flyby-Antalus portion of our Unreal Tournament tests put Nvidia's new card ahead of its ATI rival.
The tables turned somewhat in the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell tests, with the 9800 Pro 256MB besting the 5900 Ultra when we enabled the highest-quality settings--albeit by a maximum of 8 percent.
ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro performs slightly better than the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in this test under the highest quality settings.
The bell has sounded, and we have the always-unpopular split decision. In the end though, it's difficult to declare which card is the performance champ. Whether the 5900 Ultra has a slight edge over the 9800 Pro 256MB is debatable, depending on the scores you look at; however, Nvidia has at least caught up with ATI in terms of super-fast 3D graphics performance.
Expect to see GeForce FX 5900 Ultra boards by the middle of June selling for US$499 from numerous vendors, including Asus and Creative Labs. There will also be a 128MB version available for $399.
Because of allegations that Nvidia has optimised the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra to perform well on Futuremark's 3DMark03 performance benchmarks, we will be retesting this card with a new version of 3DMark. Stay tuned for our updated results.
Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Company: Nvidia
Price: US$499
Distributor: Selected resellers
I think the 256mb memery is great i bought a 128mb Ti 4200 2 months ago and i thoght that was supreme nvidia cards are much better than radeon, to me ATI are budget cards.